This third episode in the case study series for top ranking (and not so top ranking) sites for “Cheap Flights” looks at the aspects of social votes (LIKEs and Retweets) and also finds some interesting schemes like Hidden Links that Google doesn’t seem to have too much problems with.

Again, we show you EXACTLY how to drill down into the competitor profile and utilize the power of the LinkResearchTools to do competitive analysis, hunt down great links and reveal what the search engines don’t tell us.

The top ranking sites have done good work to get to the top, so like alsways in SEO, try learn from them!

Part 3 – Do Retweets and LIKEs affect organic rankings?

This video compares the #1 CheapFlights.com, the #2 CheapoAir.com in regards to retweets and likes for their back links. Pretty interesting to also find some strong hidden links.

Hello. I'm Christoph Cemper. Today, using the link research tools, we will look at the top ranking sites for cheap flights in regards to social worlds. So the question today is do retweets and Facebook Likes influence the top rankings in Google for cheap flights? Again, we've got cheapflights.com and CheapOair competing for this high competitive term. And we'll do a BATT, Backlink and Anchor Text report again for both of them. So let's look at them right away. We do see cheapflight.com-- we found 2,097 backlinks in comparison to CheapOair with 2,858 backlinks. First and foremost, it's not about the quantity as you see. Number two, these numbers are filtered. We did find a lot more backlinks, the 2,900 here. But we skipped the site-wide links. This means these 2,858 backlinks are only those backlinks that remained after removing more than five from the same domain. Overall domains filed for CheapOair that link to them were 2,182. While it's not even 1,500 cheapflights.com. Again, it's not about the quantity. Let's take a quick overview in our link profile for the theme. You know the theme of the link is very important. So let's see what cheapflights.com has. We got 430 links in a sample from the travel space. And we do have 1,290 in the travel space for CheapOair. Again it's not about the numbers. It's not about quantity. It's about quality. The question today again is do Facebook Likes and Twitter retweets affect rankings? And for that we simply switch to this new profile here for Facebook Likes and retweets to compare the two. We see that 445 backlinks going to the cheapOair domain-- we do have a domain-wide analysis. 445 of them do have between one and 10 retweets. Let's look at cheapflights.com. They do have 135 between one and 10. That's less. What about the next biggest thing, 11 to 100. 155 versus 65. 31, 28. That's not really, really a big difference. I mean you could argue that they have six pages linking to them that have-- six pages of them have 10,000 retweets. Let's see if we find out more with the Facebook Likes. Facebook Likes for Cheapflights. Again, a lot of the links do not have a single Facebook like. 164 have one to 10, while CheapOair has 493 again. They have 214 between 11 and 100 Facebook Likes versus 72 . 21 and 7 in the greater than 1,000 category. Cheapflights has a little bit stronger socially voted pages linking to them. One new feature that we have in the link profiles is to drill down to actual anchor text. What happens if I filter by Cheapflights, the keyword that we're looking at? As you see, this drops dramatically. Not a single page linking to CheapOair with Cheapflights has more than 1,000 Facebook Likes. What about Cheapflights? Cheapflights would come as the benefit of having an exact match domain name, so it's not very crazy too link to them with cheap flights if the name is Cheapflights, right? So they have four pages linked to them with more than 1,000 Facebook Likes. And that's interesting. That's a pretty big amount of Facebook Likes, although I don't know how many they are. But we could actually drill down a little bit. Let's see if these follow links. So we uncheck the no follow dimension at the link that found here for CheapOair. It's got less again. I'm very curious to see what happens with Cheapflights. Some pages removed. But the strong ones remained. So I think it's worthwhile to look into them. Because I think it's a nice finding. So if we scroll down and just go to the tables here below, we can repeat that again and filter by cheap flights. And if we assume this up, go to the category. You see there's a lot of data in there. You have to be familiar with all the data if you're looking at it. But we do have the Facebook Likes here. So we filter all pages that have more than 999 Facebook Likes. OK. That's four. 1,700, 1,200. Oh, that's cheapflight.com and cheapflights.co.uk. Interesting. Cheapflights.co.uk does link to cheapflights.com with a tax link that says cheap flights. And we also found an image link of cheapflights.com itself. As you can see the authority of these pages are really high at the domains, obviously, as well. The number of links that we see for CheapOair was 0. But 0 for Cheapflights anchor text. No. We don't want to see anchor text. We would just want to see the links with a lot of Likes. That's 999 or more Likes. OK. They do have two. It's CheapOair and philippinesbudgettravel. So philippinesbudgettravel links to CheapOair with Philippine Airlines. That's the one page that has 1,100 Likes and links to them. And Cheapflights does have a link from cheapflight.co.uk with 1,200 links. And cheapflight.com links to itself with Cheapflights in the image alt text. Let's look a bit further. If we do look at the cheapflight.co.uk that links to cheapflights.com, if you look at the source code, as you can see here. If you look at the source code of cheapflights.couk, I want to find where cheapflights.com is linked. I take out links to cheapflights.com, cheapflightscom, co.uk, ca for Canada, Cheapflug for Germany. But they all link to their respective sister sites that are hosted in different countries, different IPs worth a nice anchor text. And make sure they hae the country specification, like Cheapflights USA, Cheapflights Canada, out of the link. You see this? I think it's pretty smart. Vuelos paratos, for cheap flights in Spanish is even on the domain cheapvuelos.es. Well we could look into this network in the next video. It's a hidden [INAUDIBLE]. And we have cheap flights, cheap flights, cheap flights, cheap flights, linking to the sister sites. That's pretty smart. And we see we have 1,200 Likes on this page. What about the other one, CheapOair, with their Philippines budget travel. CheapOair is the cheapest airfare when booking flights on Phillipines Airlines, is the title attribute. But the anchor text is Philippine Airlines. Let's look. We do have four very strong pages with over 1,000 Facebook Likes linking to cheapflights.com. But two of them are cheapflight.com themselves. And the other two are pages on cheapflights.co.uk. And I must admit this cheapflights.co.uk book flights online subpage does have a substantial amount of Facebook Likes, almost 1,200 again. But looking at the Philippines Budget Travel, this looks like-- not like a travel agency. Actually, this is a blog [INAUDIBLE]. So I wonder what would happen if this Philippine Airlines link would be changed to Cheapflights at Philippine Airlines, or maybe just Cheapflights. Because CheapOair does lose in the number of very liked pages linking to them. With this I want to end the research today. As you can imagine, we do have a lot more data. And it's necessary to look at a lot more different charts-- look at a number 3, the number 4, 11, 12. And keep in mind every industry is different. Every language is different. That's why we do profile hour competition. It is different for Billigflug in German. And probably it's very different again in Spanish. So just make sure you understand your competition, and link research tools help you do that. Thank you very much. I'm Cristoph Cemper. Have a wonderful day. Bye bye.

Christoph C. Cemper is the CEO and Founder of LinkResearchTools and Link Detox. A well-known and distinguished expert in SEO who started link building for clients in 2003, building the Link Research Tools since 2006 and marketing it as SaaS product since 2009. When the famous Google Penguin update changed the rules of SEO in 2012, Christoph started Link Detox, software for finding links that pose a risk in a website’s backlink profile. He introduced ongoing link audits and risk management to the market in early 2011. In 2015, Christoph introduced Impactana, a new technology platform and SaaS product to measure the success of content beyond “social buzz”, to find content, videos and people that make an impact.

I have been looking for case studies on FB likes/retweets. Can’t really find many. I really do admire your search for truth but when you were doing your video, there were way to many outside factors as to tell how much FB likes and retweets help SEO.

My conclusion at the moment is, yes they help, but they are not really anywhere near as big of a ranking factor as links. I have found little evidence over the past two years to convince me otherwise of this either.

Well we at NextSEO have been working on 4 different tests at the same time with 4 different domain names with the same niche, and after 1 month we saw that web sites with more tweets and likes are being shown before those with none of tweets and likes. So, I agree with you that Twitter and Facebook do really have value for SEO.

Pretty neat your link tool, it offers some interesting link analysis tools one the most complete I’ve seen so far.

But I didn’t quite understand do RTs and FB likes affect rankings? You showed that cheapflights have thousands of Facebook likes and RTs, so you are saying is that why they rank top for their targeted term?

The obvious confounding factor in the analysis here is the exact match domain name. Its impossible to determine its exact impact, but the fact that CheepFlights.com have the exact match + the UK exact match, each with thousands of links, makes it virtually impossible to outrank them unless Google changes its exact match standards.

I’d like to invite you to check out our blog (just click my name here), because we’re currently conducting a controlled case study to determine the effect of Facebook Likes on rank. We’ve taken every precaution possible to ensure that there are no confounding variables such as exact match vs. non-exact match.

I believe the quality of a backlink is improved (apart from the overall authority of the site where the page is found) by two things, if that page where the backlinks is found gets any traffic and if that traffic clicks through to the page being linked to through the link on the page. This is where those likes and links in tweets are helpful, because social traffic is “click-happy” traffic, easy to get them to click a link when they see a friend sharing on FB or Twitter… and if the content on the page they have landed is good and they click through to the site being linked to on the page.. that backlink is more valuable.

Now, don’t take my word for it as this is just one of my theories, a guiding principle whenever I build backlinks and ensure that these backlinks are of good quality.

The LinkResearchTools by Christoph Cemper are very useful. Intelligent functions and practical features make backlink research a genuine pleasure. With the LinkResearchTools linkbuilding becomes simpler and more efficient.

Bjoern Tantau, Managing Director of TAMECO Onlinemarketing

I work with two publicly listed companies in Sweden and I use your tool in my work for them. LinkResearchTools is one of the most important tools in my SEO work for clients since it gives me a lot of control of the links and the competitors. I can also focus my linking job to the most important links.